An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), commonly known as a drone and in some cases referred to as a Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA), may be an aircraft without a human pilot aboard. There are different kinds of drones. A drone may be an unmanned air system (UAS), unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), remote piloted aircraft systems (RPAS) and model aircraft. Its flight is controlled either autonomously by onboard computers or by the remote control of a pilot on the ground or in another vehicle. The typical launch and recovery method of an unmanned aircraft is by the function of an automatic system or an external operator on the ground. Historically, UAVs have been simple remotely piloted aircraft.
UAV's are typically deployed for military and special operation applications, but also used in a small but growing number of civil applications, such as policing and firefighting, and nonmilitary security work, such as inspection of power or pipelines.
During use, a UAV can execute one or more programs on-board the UAV to collect and interpret data. The programs can provide the collected and/or interpreted data to a flight control system to initiate a flight response.